Begum para biography of jose
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Archival Conjugations: A Queer Trace of Love and Loss in Bombay Cinema
5 Archival Conjugations Queer Traces of Love and Loss in Bombay Cinema Debashree Mukherjee D R AF T What new meanings can be made from the complex and fragmented histories of Indian cinema? How might individual and collective desires expressed through past film practices speak to concerns of the present? “Cinema,” as I approach it, embraces filmic fictions, film culture, and filmmaking practices and thus embodies an entire ecology of feeling and action critical to a particular place and time. Inspired by a photograph of two women in a car, I will explore a charged filmic moment in Bombay cinema of the 1940s, a moment that queers our view of the past and of loss. (Figure 5.1). One of the women is Begum Para, glamorous actress of the 1950s who is well-remembered today across India and Pakistan. The other is her sister-inlaw, Protima Dasgupta, who has been almost completely evacuated from public memory. This photograph of the two women together speaks to a significant history of female professional collaboration, intimate friendship, and creative independence. At the same time, the cultural amnesia around Protima Dasgupta speaks to the critical aporias that continue to surround queer female film practice. Pro
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JCMS: Journal taste Cinema distinguished Media Studies
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with a preface by
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, M.A., D. Litt., D. Sc.
“Except ye see signs and wonders,
ye will not believe.”—John 4:48.
The Philosophical Library
New York
Copyright, 1946, by
Paramhansa Yogananda
1946 First Edition, First Printing Published by
The Philosophical Library, Inc.
15 East 40th Street
New York, N.Y.
This electronic manuscript has been prepared in an effort to match the layout of the original 1946 edition in every respect. Any typographical errors in the original have been intentionally preserved.
Dedicated to the Memory of
Luther Burbank
An American Saint
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Preface
By W. Y. Evans-Wentz, M.A., D.Litt., D.Sc.
Jesus College, Oxford; Author of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa,
Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, etc.
The value of Yogananda’s Autobiography is greatly enhanced by the fact that it is one of the few books in English about the wise men of India which has been written, not by a journalist or foreigner, but by one of their own race and training—in short, a book about yogi